To me, if the relationship is so good, so worth, or however you want to describe it... then what is preventing you from being honest, and actually discussing and getting permission for it?
In my eyes, life is too short to be in a relationship and not have your needs met. That could be getting approval to go elsewhere for certain things and never discussing it with your main squeeze, other than having obtained the approval. I get that not everybody wants to know that their partner does x, y, or z with someone else.
Yes, I can understand what your grandfather did, but if the scenario arose with me, I would damn well discuss it with my partner. Even if I were the one bedridden/etc, part of loving and caring for my sweetie would be giving that permission, thinking of the difficulties going on not just for myself but for my sweetie. Yes, it would probably fuck me up some, at least for a bit to think of my partner going to someone else, but I would rather know things than have something done behind my back.
That being said, I know not everyone is as much about brutal honesty as I am. I've been the person who was cheated on before. This, in spite of on a few occasions asking that former partner if their needs were met, if they had things they wanted to try, other people they wanted to fuck, etc. They still decided to take the scumbag route, in spite of a blatantly obvious willingness on my part to adjust parameters of our relationship.
So for my $0.02, I don't think it's naive to say if something is damaged/not working/needs aren't met, to fix it or move on. There are many ways to fix something.
You are a product of your self indulgent era.
You weren't born in 1897 in Portugal. You never emigrated to a new country and met your wife as a pregnant woman abandoned by her husband on the boat to america... you didn't have to see your wife's first child, the son you adopted, hauled out of the river by his foot when he drowned at age 7... or try to help your wife, who did not speak english, and was suffering from inconsolable grief as she was hauled away to a sanitarium to be 'treated' for Hysteria- by being given a hysterectomy.
You didn't have to figure out a way to deal with your wife's depression at going thru menopause at 27- in an age before hormone treatments - her loss of interest, first in sex, and then in life itself, nor try to talk a life-long and devout catholic in the era before vatican II to turn a blind eye to a dalliance.
You weren't there, growing all your family's food thru the crushing poverty of the depression, raising rabbits for meat, and having to work two shifts, thankful for the jobs, and yet still be there for your increasingly incapable and distant wife.
You weren't faced with the choice of concealing the the thing you did to enable yourself to cope, or being "honest" with the woman who had had so much stripped from her and be the one to strip this last, final illusion of being your one and only from a life increasingly isolated from everyone except for you, her husband. The man who stood by her and endured the unendurable.
You can sit on your high horse of hard won freedoms, and cultural revolutions and stamp your pretty little foot and make Demands about how YOU should be served only what you wish...
But you just reveal your own selfish conceits about what is acceptable or not in the hard grind of life between two broken and shattered souls... just trying to make it to a peaceful end.
I don't disagree that a lot of infidelity is simple self indulgence.
But I have lived too long and seen too much to imagine that I know all the tracks thru the frailties of the human heart.
It can not be reduced to black and white. To either or.
Sometimes the cheater is a cad. And sometimes the cheated on deserve it.
Sometimes its a stupid mistake to try and recapture some sense of being attractive to someone else.
Sometimes its something you did once, because you were raised to think a certain way, and forever after regretted, a changed person.
Sometimes its just animal heat.
And sometimes its the kindest, most discrete way you can stick it out with someone you dearly love and who needs you to stick it out.
Sometimes you talk it out and make sure they are okay with it.
While I agree with you in pure principle... I would break it off if I wanted another.
Or tough it out and stay true.
In practice, no one who hasn't remained faithful for 60 years has any right to shake their finger on the absolute belief that the cheater has always done wrong.
Betrayal comes in so many forms... it can be impossible to tell who broke faith first.
and we are all just mortal... facing our fears and advancing years in increasingly less able bodies and coming sometime to very hard realizations at how shatteringly finite everything truly is.
I had a woman who stopped letting me touch her at 47, after 17 years of devotion. For three years I remained faithful and tried to win her affections back, tried to get her to see a counselor together or even doctor...
And she expected fidelity... to what? That she could make the unilateral decision that i would never again feel an impassioned embrace?... a sweetly erotic kiss? never again see a woman look at me with desire? That she could exercise choice over sexuality for us both?
And so I did the proper thing, by your and my lights... I separated from her without ever having touched another...
And where am I now? Alone, at 59? where is the woman who i might have spent my declining years with, after 30 plus years of sweet togetherness and youthful passions... burned out, but those memories there to carry us thru?
The intolerance of absolutes has not served me well. It made the woman i love unwilling to bend on my needs. and me unwilling to be a cheater and so I left.
And I have my honor and my sense of having done right... and that is all I have on a cold night.
There will be No one sitting beside me in the doctor's office to comfort me when I must face the hard news we all must someday face. No one for whom I can be that comfort.
I'm sorry. My grandfather was a better man, not in spite but because of his dalliance.
He never lost sight of what mattered. He wasn't in it for just himself. And I will never know if my grandmother secretly knew of what he was up to, and simple pretended to not know... because she loved him and knew he was there in all the ways that really mattered.
Wisdom comes- often late- and at such terrible cost.